Monday, April 9, 2012

Men At Work: A Meaningful Life

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

—Bella Abzug,
American social activist & leader of women's movement

"I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights,' with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to 'unsex' themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection."

—Queen Victoria, March, 1870

One of the chief meanings that men get from life is to work and to provide for the family. I say men with a purpose, because men derive meaning from work more than women. It's generally true, and this has nothing to do with my position on women's ability to excel. If you read my blog postings, my views are formed within the larger framework of human dignity for both males and females. Although some might deny such things as sexual differences, there are real differences between males and females that reams of scientific studies have shown and proven. One can always choose to ignore such differences, yet it doesn't alter the facts one iota.

Today, the subject of men and employment is a taboo subject. Yet, in an open and democratic society, it needs airing. Feminism and the effects of its politics of resentment and entitlement, in the last four decades, have placed men in the uncomfortable and sad position of not being able to find employment—and without a job too many men have slid into despair and reside with a definite loss of meaning.

In an effort to better the position of women, among other disenfranchised groups, preferences for university admissions and thus jobs have now been given to women. These programs of social engineering have been successful. Women now outnumber men in the workforce [see here& here]. Women now outnumber men in university admissions and university graduates [see here and here], which is a good indicator of employability. While this is generally a good thing—no one doubts the ability of women to excel in many fields—it's come at a social and, more important, a personal cost to individual men and their families. The unemployment rate for men has been steadily climbing, where it now is greater for men than for women [see here.]

This includes myself. A few years ago, after more than 10 years of freelancing, I considered returning to the workplace full-time in the publishing sector, I sent out dozens, if not hundreds of CVs. I received a handful of interviews, despite my education and many years of experience. In all the positions that I had applied for, the person conducting the interview was a woman, more often than not younger than I. When you have been through many interviews, you know whether or not you are a serious candidate or are just being interviewed to fill a quota of interviewees. I was the male candidate in such cases.

Needless to say, I never received any job offer, nor did I ever receive the courtesy of a response to why I was not hired. Needless to say, I have since then stopped looking for a full-time job in the publishing sector, which is now dominated by females, and I continue to freelance. Moreover, I have other interests and pursuits, many noble and good, though I feel a keen sense of loss. I am sure that I am not alone, having seen many persons, chiefly men, in my situation at job workshops, each with the hopeless look of the non-working. This is truly a sad sight.

This is not sour grapes, or gender envy, or anything of that sort. My story, however, is symbolic of something greater, and raises an important question: what will be the cost to western society when massive crowds of unemployed men are not using their abilities and talents? We are now witnessing a socio-economic situation never before witnessed in our history, where men cannot find employment despite employers saying they have unfilled jobs. It might explain the high levels of male suicide, the high levels of depression and the high levels of violent crime among men. All are highly undesirable social ills, many of which can be corrected by giving men the jobs and the resultant dignity they desire and need.

It's easy to say that society (and men) ought to change their standards, but the reality is that men and work are closely linked and harmonized to self-esteem, social status and self-fulfillment. Men and work go together like apple pie and ice cream. Non-working men are still looked at with suspicion, as if they were social pariahs. And, more to the point, working men are always less likely to drop out of society; they are too highly committed to its development and betterment. Work gives men purpose and meaning. Work makes men feel good about themselves, and about society in general.

Am I advocating returning to the 1950s? No, but I am advocating something that few politicians or governments in the West will discuss willingly and openly: the dirty little secret about affirmative action and equity programs; in short, about male discrimination in the workplace. A viable step would be to to get rid of special access for the female gender in all affirmative action programs in the West, since they are no longer necessary for women. Perhaps affirmative action in general ought to be retired.

Such government programs have evolved from equal access to special privilege and dispensations, which is what all such programs eventually end up doing. It is interesting to note that in both Canada and the U.S., Jews faced restrictive quotas in university admissions between the 1920s and 1940s, and in workplace hiring and advancement in some industries up to the 1960s. Despite such practices, Jews eventually found a way to overcome such obstacles, through hard work and perseverance, and as a group have done well.

Undoubtedly, there has been a shift in thinking in the last three of four decades, brought on to a large degree by a dissatisfaction with traditional values, and a decision to rely on social engineering. Some, notably hard-core militant or radical feminists, who are steeped in the theories of Karl Marx and are avowed Marxists, have influenced the debate and discussion in the West to a surprisingly large degree. Academia is greatly responsible for the shift in thinking, providing the intellectual talking points for government policy-makers. It must be added that only in academia are the discredited theories of Marx given legitimacy and the light of day. The result is that Marxist feminists, emboldened by such academic legitimacy and coupled with tales of victim-hood, are not above using inflammatory, vulgar and coarse language to make their point. This only proves that women can be as crass as men, if not more.

But then again, radical feminism, like all narrow-interest movements, is fueled by anger, hatred and the raw emotion of vengeance. It robs both men and women of their dignity, since its motivations are less than honourable. Given its Marxist bent, many of its values are anti-democratic; and its animus is often wrongly directed at the easy targets of Western civilization. Its purpose, it seems, is to dismantle hundreds of years of Enlightenment thinking, and for all its purported views on progress, it is in a great sense, anti-progressive or retrograde, not seeking equality but female superiority. Generally, movements that want to destroy rather than build eventually accomplish little that is good, although it might seem that way in the short-term. We can see the results after more than 40 years of so-called progress.

In short, feminism, notably the militant sort, is morally bankrupt, since its interests are narrow and it has to find an straw-man enemy: the Patriarchy (i.e., men) to mobilize support and keep it it going. Its purpose in the West has expired; and if it truly wants equality for women, there are many places in the world outside the West where it can demand change, notably in the many Arabic nations where woman hold a decided secondary status. Although I suspect its efforts will meet with tough if not lethal resistance from such societies, which have a long history of repression, not only against women but against any Western Enlightenment ideas and ideals.

The war between the sexes has lead to a scorched-earth policy, where too many things have become unnecessarily politicized. Most woman can and do get along with men. A small vocal minority can't, and they seem to now lead the debate, whose purpose it is is to make life uncomfortable, unpleasant and nasty for men. Truly, the current situation is nothing to be happy about. Not even for women.

4 comments:

Affirmative action goes back to the early 1920s and was a way to keep Jews from becoming the overwhelming majority in Ivy League colleges. It was instituted for rightist reasons (Jews are ill-mannered and unsophisticated) and continues for leftist reasons (Jews are rich and powerful). Women are no longer underrepresented in many professions. They are underrepresented in physics. Does that mean physicists are particularly sexist? How did Marie Curie manage to win two Nobel prizes in the days when there was no affirmative action?Discrimination, whether for rightist or leftist reasons, is wrong.

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All comments ought to reflect the post in question. All comments are moderated; and inappropriate comments, including those that attack persons, those that use profanity and those that are hateful, will not be tolerated. So, keep it on target, clean and thoughtful. This is not a forum for personal vendettas or to create a toxic environment. The chief idea is to engage, to discuss and to critique issues. Doing so within acceptable norms will make the process more rewarding and healthy for everyone.﻿ Accordingly, anonymous comments will not be posted.

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Yiddish Sites (listed since August 2017)

There are dozens of sites dedicated to Yiddish language, culture and music. Here are some that I have found noteworthy. I will add to the list regularly. If you have a Yiddish site or know of one, please do not hesitate to contact me atpjgreenbaum@gmail.com:

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Afn Shvel(“On the Threshold”), a magazine published by the League for Yiddish, dating to 1941, it is committed to the promotion and preservation of the Yiddish language and culture. It published two double issues a year. Its editor-in-chief is Sheva Zucker;

American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College’s Jewish Institute of Religion contains more than 10 million pages of documents. manuscripts, genealogical materials, as well as thousands of audiovisual recordings, photographs, microfilm and digital collections;

Center for Jewish History, in New York City, has 5 miles of archival material (in dozens of languages), more than 500,000 volumes, as well asthousands of artworks, textiles, ritual objects, recordings and photographs;

JewishGen Yizkor Book Project, a database of more than 1,000 yizkor books worldwide, a good number of them have been translated from Hebrew and Yiddish into English;

Language and Cultural Atlas of Ashkenazic Jews,from Columbia University,consists of 5,755 hours of audio tape interviews with Yiddish-speaking Jews from Central and eastern Europe, done between 1959 and 1972 along with around 100,000 pages of linguistic field notes;

Lexilogos, a compilation of Yiddish online resources, including dictionaries, grammar books, and a translation of the Torah (Toyre) in Yiddish;

Milken Archive of Jewish Music, a record of the American Jewish Experience; since 1990, it has become the largest collection of American Jewish music with about 600 recorded works, including a number in Yiddish;

Museum of the Yiddish Theatre, an online museum originating in New York City and founded by Dr. Steven Lasky, has in its collection such items as photographs, theatre programs, sheet music, audio recordings and other documents of some importance and historical significance;

Pakn Treger, (“itinerant bookseller in Eastern Europe who traveled from shtetl to shtetl ”), the magazine of the Yiddish Book Centre;

Recorded Sound Archives (RSA) of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton contains more than 100,000 recordings of music, a great many in Yiddish;

Songs of My People, a site by Josephine Yalovitser dedicated to Yiddish songs of mourning and of joy;

The National Center For Jewish Film, based at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is the home to 15,000 reels of feature films, documentaries, newsreels, home movies and institutional films, dating from 1903 to the present; this effort has led to the revival of Yiddish cinema;

Yizkor Book Collection at the New York Public Library provide a documentation of daily life, through essays and photographs and the memoralizing of murdered residents, of Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust. Of the 750 yizkor books in its collection, 618 have been digitalized. Most yizkor books are in Yiddish or Hebrew;

YUNG YiDiSH, a site dedicated to preserving and promoting Yiddish culture in Israel;